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A 1,900-year-old stone monument which was to be submerged by the huge Three Gorges dam project in the county of Zhongxian, Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, has been rescued.
Archaeologists have finished moving the slab, known as a stele, to a safe temple where two other priceless ancient steles also recovered from the designated reservoir area stand.
The 5.65-metre-high stele, dating from the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD), is a type of monument called "Que" that was usually made in pairs. Que pillars stood on either side of entrances to Buddhist temples, palaces and tombs of nobles and senior officials.
This stele is believed to have stood on the right-hand side, and is named "Wuming" in Chinese which means it carries no inscription.
The country has recovered five Que steles altogether. Four comprise two pairs. One pair was moved to the same temple as the latest stele on February 12. The other pair will go on show in a new museum in Chongqing as the most complete Que ever found in China.
The Que steles are one of the oldest and most imposing forms of stone monuments discovered in the country and many include valuable sculptures, said Wang Chuanping, deputy director of the Culture Bureau of the Chongqing municipal government.
The team had to build a simple access road to get a truck to the stele's original site to move the huge stone out, said Zhang Caiyou, a leading archaeologist in charge of the transfer..
Archaeologists numbered the nine parts of the stele and wrapped each in foam sponge, blankets and 2-centimetre-thick pieces of wood. To avoid damaging the stele while transporting it, they cushioned it with a layer of sand 30 centimetres thick in the truck.
The other big headache was getting the stele into the temple, Zhang said. People could hardly move it up the 100 steps in front of the gate because the main body of the stele weighs four tons.
Specialists laid pieces of wood on the steps with logs under the stele parts and eventually "rolled" the nine heavy stones up the long stairway.
It took the archaeologists a full nine days from January 6 to 14 to move all the stele pieces into the temple and then another month to reassemble them.
(China Daily February 24, 2003)
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